Last weekend I had a sunshine day out at the Wireless festival. The weather was insanely hot and perfect for people-watching – I saw so many cute summer looks!

I was lucky enough to be in the VIP section, in between running around the various tents, and I caught up with Jamie Winstone, whose lavender hair is a fun shade for summer, and I loved, loved, loved Paloma Faith’s high-waisted shorts combo as she walked around with her Louis Vuitton trunk and stylish mate; I sat next to them in the Barclaycard party tent and they were so friendly.
Missy Elliot had amazing dancers and was such a great act but unfortunately her P.A. mustn’t have got the memo about Germany beating England in the World Cup so she was booed throughout the second half of her performance as she wore a German tracksuit!
My girl Lisa wore an Isabel Marant dress and summer boots with hair that was softly tousled and got featured in Grazia. At the moment she is my “thinspiration” as I hit the gym daily and get my ass kicked by a trainer (her summer wardrobe is too good to miss a “friend-lend”!).
Mostly I loved the girls in super-short shorts with brown vintage men’s shoes or super-high Chloe wedges. I saw so many braids and fun dyed locks.
Halfway through the day I bumped into James Mahon, my make-up artist friend, and we took people-watching to a new level! Definitely worth a mention were all the neon lipsticks and double lashes.
At Lisa’s before I covered my limbs with Scott Barnes (Jennifer Lopez’s make-up artist) body bling (so shimmery and pretty – you must try it, ladies!). It was my first half-naked outing this summer and the adornment gave me so much more confidence…
We had so much fun that we have booked a Yute for V festival. And scrambled after Latitude tickets. Roll on, summer fun!

On Friday night I ventured out to club land after a period of long, leisurely dining in my favourite restaurants Nobu Berkley and Bistroteque.
My appetite had been whetted two weeks previously when I turned up at the infamous Pooldisco at Shoreditch House to find it in full swing with an eclectic crowd of exotic Belgian fashionistas, New York extroverts and the coolest cutest East End crowd.
So after a late dinner with friends on the Shoreditch rooftop we set off to what seemed like another world. The club Caligula is held in The Bathhouse in Liverpool Street, and it’s a den of cavernous, Moroccan-tiled booths hidden by heavy velvet curtains. It felt like walking into the Blitz Club. The music was electro and house. I went to see the DJ Krisdangelis, who is managed by my friend Mark Herman, and it was such an amazing night.
I bumped into friends with eccentric looks that I have styled since the Kashpoint days. I snapped a few shots with my iphone and thought I would include them here.
Caligula should for sure be on your lists of things to do. It was creative eye candy heaven!


Click here for all the Caligula photos

For me, this weekend marked the beginning of a busy time in the diary – ‘tis wedding season!
Wedding hair has blurred lines these days, I feel. Gone is the need for a pinned-up hairdo that is alien to the bride’s everyday style. With more designers adding wedding dresses to their collections and now that net a porter has a wedding section, it’s easier than ever to be a modern, on-trend bride.
My friend Bex had a wedding weekend!
Bex is a bit of a fashionista. She wears her hair very soft and loose  – a kind of undone Bardot.
For her wedding she wore a Vivienne Westwood gown and towering gold Dior heels. For the day I dressed her hair with a technique I use when getting actresses and singers ready for a red carpet event.

I glued in rows of real hair wefts from the nape of the neck to just below ear level, and then through the sides. I used wefts that had been matched to her hair colour, which is a multi-toned blonde.
The extensions I use are from Hairaisers. They have wefts that have a highlighted effect. I chose three different blends. For the sides I “split the weave” using a fine razor blade so that the hair I put in was extremely fine.
After a big bouncy blow-dry I added the hair, cut it to her length with a razor then tonged the whole head and left it to cool. I always put a mist of dry shampoo in the nape of the neck and sides of the hair. Then, holding Bex’s head upside down, I brushed out for about five minutes with a Mason Pearson, finally back-brushing the underneath a little.

The result is a big, bouncy blow-out that lasts and lasts. The wefts stop the hair looking stringy at the ends and give it a major “expensive” feel.
Bex just looked so modern-day chic! She married in Southwark Cathedral next to Borough Market, then her 220 guests and I got on a private train to Oxford. 

The reception was incredible, with a marquee filled with animals like lions wearing tiaras – it had a real Les Trois Garcons feel to it.
 

The party went on till 4am with amazing DJs and a Glam Tent section, as well as rooms so everyone stayed over. The weekend continued with a BBQ and games and more DJs till Monday.
The next day Bex changed into Isabel Marant and I kept her hair fresh by stealing her away every four hours and brushing her hair out with a Mason Pearson that revived the style.
The one thing that remained un-partied out was her hair!

Back in November I attended a P&G conference and saw Sam McKnight showcase the look he designed for the spring/summer 2010 Mulberry collection. If you drive by a Mulberry store you will see that all the mannequins are dressed with this look.
I just love it, in an over-the-top but luxe cool-cute way, and so at SALON SMART I chose it as a look for one of my models. I call it The Super-Crimp.

1. First I prepped the hair with a styling spray to protect it from the heat of the crimpers. This was blown into the hair with a Mason Pearson brush.
2. Using BaByliss Pro Crimpers and starting from the nape of the neck and at the roots, crimp each section for exactly the same amount of time (I am a 10 second girl myself – this is a hairstyle to be truly anal about!) otherwise the result will vary.
3. Make sure that you “link the crimp” – ie, join the grooves so you don’t leave any straight bits.
4. At the sides, crimp backwards instead of downwards to pull the style off the face.
5. Take a Mason Pearson and brush through continually – the more you brush the bigger the hair and the softer the crimp (no 80′s Toyah Wilcox references, please)
6) Walk into the party head held high… and own the look !

I prepped this with Silvikrin Heat Creations blow-dry spray .

Thank you to Skyler, who patiently crimped this on the day with Sabrina from Hari’s while I chatted PR strategies onstage!

To my regular blog readers, apologies for my absence! In the last few weeks I have been to Canada, Rome, Paris and Brazil – and now I am in Argentina. I am on a music promo and have worked many evenings during my normal blog-writing hour!
The world has been brought to a standstill air-wise by the volcanic ash storm, as we know, and it certainly turned my little hair world upside down a few weeks ago too.
The main act for the SALON SMART weekend was stuck in America: Mr Robert Lobetta – legendary hair man/god/guru.
And so I was asked to step in and do the show – a 90-minute talk followed by a 45-minute hair styling show. Well, for those of you not working in the hair world, this is the equivalent of the audience turning up to see Madonna only to find an X Factor finalist on the stage! I mean this man is a walking, talking genius!
Three days to go and I found myself making apologetic phone calls to the hen party peeps that I was meant to be spending a classy debauched weekend with, and instead sitting for four hours in the Hoxton Hotel (great place to spend four hours, fyi) with the calm, serene Joanna Andersen from Creative HEAD magazine, putting together a presentation on salon business.
In a diva-like moment I insisted on a top-class assistant team, who were to prep the models as I stood in front of the 200-plus crowd. In my many hair years I have learnt one huge fact: you are only ever as good as the team you have around you. And so Skyler, Chris Appleton and Zlata Jasenc were summoned.
For the hair part of the show (it’s amazing how much calmer I felt with a head of hair in front of me!) I took catwalk looks from S/S 10 and A/W 10 and styled them out on stage. They are some of my favourite looks, so in my next post I am going to run through them with a How-To.
The audience was made up of people with great businesses and also hairdressers who have certainly inspired me over the years. I like to think that in my X Factor moment I turned out as a Susan Boyle (albeit dressed in Comme des Garcons!).
Thank you to everyone for being a wonderful audience and for a general lack of cabbage throwing!

Ohhh my god, where do I start?!
Maybe at the beginning of my day…
My ELLE day starts with a visit to  Miss Lisa Snowdon, where we decide to do a look from the show by Peter Pilotto, as she’s going to be wearing one of his dresses – we’d found it on a girlie shopping trip to Liberty. It’s textured hair that I wrap around pins in a bric-brac style, and then pin in an up-do.
I then dash to the Haymarket Hotel to tend to the locks of Lorraine Candy, a wonderful client and the editor of ELLE. She is wearing an incredible Alexander McQueen dress that simply mustn’t be upstaged by her hair, so I choose to do a textured side twist. I adore Lorraine. She is funny and clever and looks so beautiful in a gown that I could only dream to wear!
Time then for a quick turnaround as I’m attending the awards too, thanks to an invite from Lorraine. Lucky me!
With a David Seeta dress on, and a smokey eye courtesy of Mss Snowdon, I walk into the Grand Connaught Rooms to witness this massive awards do.
The tables are dressed in the most amazing way, with glass domes that hold butterflies and birds made of ELLE magazine pages. The menus are in snow-filled domes.
I sit on a table with Danni Minogue, George Lamb with Lisa – and just six feet away from Colin Firth. And Nicholas Hoult OMG!!!
Someone asked me the other day how being a hairstylist had changed my life. Well, if I had a night to sum it all up, this would surely be it.
The night before I had sat at home watching the Baftas, and here I am now, not 24 hours later, in the same room as incredible actors and musicians and woman and men of power.
Give me a day at a school leavers’ convention and I could give you a hundred reasons to be a hairstylist. The happy times it gives me, the people I get to meet and the drive and ambition it has always filled me with.
Now, let’s talk about the Olsen twins!
So in they walk to the reception before the awards. Maybe it’s the complete obsession I have with their dress sense and of course their hair, but I was completely floored! I wanted to jump up and down like a Beatles fan screaming at Paul McCartney (though of course completely inappropriate behaviour that would have led to me being thrown out!). They have JUST the right amount of re-growth on a blonde highlight and the MOST perfect textured hair.
They are soooooooo cool, with huge eyes and an aura that screams starlet!
Also up for hair mention:
Alexa Chung, of course, who’s tended to by the adorable George from Hershesons.
Carey Mulligan, who won a Bafta the night before, has the coolest blonde pixie cut that is a massive trend in the making.
Naomi Campbell also looked incredible in a McQueen dress and super-fine styling.
Henry Holland and Lorraine hosted the night. It was so much fun!

Zoe Irwin with Lisa Snowdon at the UK's Most Wanted 2009 Grand Final

Creative HEAD stepped up the style stakes this year with its inspiring UK’s Most Wanted awards, which proved full of surprises. I brought along a few friends for a special Creative Head shoot. They loved the evening and the shoot, which had such beautiful hair and styling. The trouble was there was so much going on, it was hard to know which bit to watch!

My Best Dressed Award goes to the beautiful Sacha Mascolo-Tarbuck, who wore a jacket that screamed “I am so hot and so this season.” If I didn’t love her so much I would be jealous!

And Adam Reed, who owns so much of his best mate Henry Holland’s collection that I’m sure he even jogs in it!

Seeing all my peers and the work they do for awards inspires me to push my ideas further. I left thinking I want an award and I must check Net-a-porter for a new jacket when I get home!

London fashion week makes me so proud to be British. I love the way all the fashion crowd appear in their outfits and you watch tiny girls tottering in crazy heels that are normally only seen after dark, sashaying down the street with their super nerdy, but cool, gay friend wearing a practised bored scowl.

My role in this is to preen the fashion teams from the magazines. I spent the week updating colours, giving styling lessons and handing out “style kits” of pins, kitten brushes and mini hair sprays to my clients so that they could survive a month of shows, dinners and parties.

Texture is one of my key lessons – you can update a look super-quick with a different texture to the style. It’s all about “over-using” style products right now . Hairspray spritzed close to the head, then blowdried to give an upstyle gloss and a slightly tortured modern quality. I spray my fingers with a strong hairspray and rake them through the tops and sides of ponytails. I’m also still hooked on my dry shampoo habit! I overspray the ends of hair, then follow with the crimper and finally brush the hair with a Mason Pearson before placing it in a scruffy chignon.

A great friend of mine just got hitched in a beautiful castle in Worcestershire. It was covered in amazing art works and suits of armour but I was determined to upstage the venue with her hair.

At first she was going to get a local chick to do it and I was going to have the morning off to spend with my new handsome man getting ready, which was dreadfully sweet of her as I have never attended a wedding without sprucing the brides lock. But then I realised that it would upset me to see someone else’s do on the bride and not see the moment that the father walks in and sheds a tear at his little princess in her gown. So I got involved, and after a trial and a chat, started making a mini wig to put in the back.

My friend is cool and tres beautiful so I could have done a neat little chignon (kinda ethereal) and she would have looked stunning, but why make it easy? So with Eva Mendes as my reference I took to her barnet with the enthusiasm of a stylist at the finals of a world hair championship. I prepped her with a bag full of treatments and under strict instruction to do a masque every other day (were the daily nagging text messages a tad over the top?!). It meant that come said day her hair was so beautifully shiny I could pile on a mountain of tecni art Volume Mousse and blow it out so that it would’ve stayed up until Christmas, while still shining bright. No gloss for me – by the best man’s speech it would have flopped! I blew her cute fringe to the side and teased the top out, coiffing it into a major beehive. The back was folded from one side to the other and at the nape I inserted a little mini wig (Betty we called it) so she had a long pony that came from one side and fell to her waist.

The trouble was I got all sessiony during the photos and styled her with my mini teasing brush every time a gust caught her hair. I must have thought I was on a shoot for Brides magazine. At this point she was probably wishing the local chick had done it!

Luckily new handsome man stole me away and gave me champagne and kisses before my friend called my agent and took me off the job!

The little bridesmaid was the hardest of them all with demands for curls a certain way (at six years old!) I nearly muttered to her “Do you know who I think am?!”

The day of the Elle Style Awards arrive: I spend half the day being ferried around the homes and hotel rooms of celebrities and journos heading to the awards. In the weeks before the big event, we rummage through magazine tears and search the internet for inspiration. I cut and colour at least seven members of the Elle team so need to be on hand for last minute touch ups too!

I’m lucky enough to be invited to the awards by Elle’s editor Lorraine Candy and have just a few minutes spare to throw on my outfit and get ready.

I’m on a table with Jade Jagger, who gives a really funny speech when she presents an award. But I have to confess to spending most of the night running from table to table catching up with friends and actresses and models that I’ve worked with and trying to get a closer look at people you usually only see in movies! Courtney Love was the most watchable, with Mickey Rourke a close second. Courtney was so worse for wear that I wondered how she’d even managed to get there. But she did look very cool in a nude, structured dress. Her speech for Woman of the Year left me wondering if I’d dreamed it: did she really say that?

I bumped into Pixie Geldoff in the toilets and spent half an hour wondering whether I should chop all my hair off. Then it dawned on me that I can remember when Pixie was born, and decided it was a look best left to the new crowd, not the old crowd. My friend David Walliams showed off his new girl, who wore a dress specially made by Giles Deacon. I wore a Chloe dress and Rupert Sanderson heels and must have had two cans of Klorane dry shampoo in my hair, with Sonia Rykiel brooches pinned into my ponytail . My hair looked as trashed as Courtney.

Sienna Miller looked amazing; I just cannot get over my girl crush on her. Alexa Chung had the cutest hair up I’ve seen for a while and kept the fashionista crowd entertained.

On the rainiest night of the year Big Sky Studio was definitely the place to be!

Christmas time in a salon has to be one of the most fun places to be! Hari’s has been buzzing with clients that arrive bearing gifts of champagne, chocolates and thoughtful, often funny, things for all the staff. Some are a little squiffy as they come from a long Christmas work lunch and amuse us while we try to keep their heads still and they jostle around with tales of their work parties and children’s nativity plays. The salon is decked out so prettily…

It is also a time of year to focus on the trainees and let them know how much we appreciate the back up they give us all year round. We have launched a Hari’s diffusion line with the new young stylists that Hari has trained and cast his watchful eye on for so long.

I learn and get so much from the trainees. They are the ones that tell me if what I’m doing is still of the moment and I base a lot of my trends on the way they want to wear their hair. Ross, Sabrina and Bruno: Ross with his achingly cool way of rolling up a trouser leg and adding a new season shoe with an old vintage mac. When I teach him how to put hairpins in he sends me back styles with a twist of freshness that he has seen at a party or just how he would like his girl to look. Sabrina trained in France and was a stylist but has come to be retrained by Hari and has so much passion for the craft and Hari’s hair. Jake had three days with me before I sent him to Germany to do the Pussycat Dolls’ hair with Timothy Crispin. I love seeing it all through their eyes; it makes it so much more exciting – Jake updates Facebook and wows his friends as he hangs with the band.

I always need them around. When I arrive to do Jaime Winston it is their clothes that she coos over and they talk music while I style her hair. What I adore at Hari’s is that they do all of this while never forgetting to pass a pin or blow out a client with just the right amount of curl. So my photos this month are of my team. The best I have ever found and my column is in praise of our youth. Tomorrow’s stylists but, for me, today’s inspiration!

Now after a month of music parties, a week of concerts and TV shows with Anastasia and Elton John’s auction – ohhh and I met Nicole Kidman in the toilets in a studio in Germany – I am going on holiday. The dancing queen Miss Snowdon and I are off to Cuba for a fortnight. We will salsa and drink and wish for all the things we hope for this New Year.

Happy New Year!